Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems (2023) Some of the new things we found to put in it

Friday, December 02, 2022

Lee Harwood New Collected Poems (2023) Some of the new things we found to put in it

The New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood is NOW available. HERE: Lee Harwood - New Collected Poems (shearsman.com)

How does the 2023 New Collected Poems differ from the 2004 one that Lee himself compiled, some people must be asking (other than the correcting of creeping errors, etc.)? Of course, it collects poems written later than that date (some of his best, I think, from Orchid Boat). We have also restored poems removed from the 2004 edition, and added poems taken out of earlier ‘collecting’ and ‘selecting’ volumes, including from the monumental The White Room of 1968. Admittedly some of these are weak poems (not all), but the restoration of the whole of his 1965 pamphlet title illegible turns up some fascinating poems, not least of all the opening poem-letter to his then literary hero Tristan Tzara. That provides a bit of a blaster to the collection, a direct hit back to modernism. (Just to confirm: Harwood's translations of Tzara, still in print elsewhere, are not included in our volume.)

At quite a late stage of editing, a pamphlet slid off the shelf (literally!), an edition of 12, published by Lee for ‘connoisseurs’, entitled In the Mists, the same title as his later Slow Dancer pamphlet. I idly thought it an early version of that; but it isn’t. There are 9 poems not already published and we have included these in a section entitled ‘Moon Phase’. Oddly, I’d always remembered the poem of that name, a second elegy to Harwood’s grandmother, and had long assumed it had been long published alongside ‘African Violets’, a poem Lee would often read at readings (reading will be the subject of my next pre-publication blog). In some ways I’ve always preferred this shorter poem, and it seems apposite to offer it here as a brief taster for the book:

Moon Phase

A misty full moon tonight

coloured pale orange

– clear as that.

Clear as the afternoon death

of a frail woman in a hospital bed,

her arms thin as sticks,

her words clear.

Overcome by age her time come,

as she desired, as it must.

Yet beyond her time she lives

in my heart, in my dreams,

as the night clouds shift.

(In memory of Pansy Harwood 1896-1989)

Our editorial principles were to publish every poem or creative prose Lee published in book and pamphlet form, but there are two (late) exceptions: a collaboration with John Hall, called ‘Loose Packed’, a series of texts to print on card, and shuffle, and read, and his final poem ‘Philatelic Counter’, a homage to the artist Donald Evans. Kelvin managed to find a fine example of his work as our cover design.